In 1989, Dallas author, filmmaker and playwright Alan Govenar took two very different homegrown Texas musicians to Paris, France, and Florence, Italy, to perform a series of concerts.

Osceola Mays was black, a spiritual singer and the granddaughter of a slave. John Burrus was white, a cowboy singer and a former rodeo competitor. They didn't have much in common other than their love for the types of music that they'd been steeped in since childhood. But that turned out to be enough.

Lillias White and Willy Welch perform in Texas in Paris by Alan Govenar at the Eisemann Center in Richardson.

(Francois Guenet)

Govenar was so moved by the way Mays and Burrus bonded in a land far from home that he turned the experience into a musical, Texas in Paris, that ran off-Broadway in 2015 and is making its Texas premiere on Thursday, Nov. 16 at the Eisemann Center in Richardson.

"They were two gentle people who sang their lives through their music. They ended up having a conversation they never thought they'd have," Govenar says on the phone. "That conversation, with dialogue that I imagined, is the drama."

Tony Award-winner Lillias White, who played Mays off-Broadway, will reprise the role in Richardson alongside Dallas musician and author Willy Welch as Burrus.

Alan Govenar

(Kaleta Doolin)

The theatrical journey has been as unexpected for Govenar as the friendship between the real-life Mays, who died in 2004 ,and Burrus, who died in 2009. Govenar has established his theatrical credentials with off-Broadway's 2007 Blind Lemon Blues, another Texas-centered true-life inspired drama, co-conceived and co-written with Dallas' Akin Babatunde, and originally developed at WaterTower Theatre in Addison.

Govenar is known for many things besides being a playwright. He is director of Documentary Arts, a nonprofit organization based in Dallas and New York that he founded in 1985. He's written more than 25 books, including a widely honored children's book, Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper's Daughter. He's produced and directed films, including feature-length documentaries. He's the founding director of the Museum of Street Culture, which opened in October in Market Park.

Govenar's journey with the stories of Mays and Burrus is in keeping with his longstanding passion for sharing the stories of ordinary people.

He met each through a radio series he produced called Traditional Music in Texas in the mid-1980s. A theater in Paris expressed interest in presenting a series of concerts featuring Mays and Burrus.

Twenty-five years after the European concerts, Govenar decided to turn the research he'd done for the series into his book, Everyday Music, published by Texas A&M University Press.

By that time, Mays and Burrus were deceased. But when he interviewed Burrus' widow, she told Govenar how "John never talked a lot about Paris, but every year, he wanted her to check in on Osceola and see how she was doing."

Govenar was struck by how these two people, from such starkly different upbringings, had grown to care for each other across the racial divide. That became the spark to write the show, he says.

"I've written so much about black and white relations, the show became a way to explore the dilemma of race that is so divisive in our country today, from the point of view of two ordinary people who aren't overtly racist, but have cultural baggage."

The show came together with unexpected swiftness. Babatunde, who knew Mays, directed.

"I was enamored by her quiet yet poignant dignity," Babatunde writes in an email. "The integrity and dignity of both of these individuals and their different life experiences which eventually becomes a shared common ground is what we all can experience as human beings."

Dallas documentary film editor Jason Johnson-Spinos, who is also the marketing director, a teacher and resident projection, lighting and sound designer at Outcry Theatre, designed the sound and projections for the show, working in part from footage that Govenar shot in Paris.

York Theater Company, the off-Broadway company that produced Blind Lemon Blues in 2009, presented Texas in Paris in 2015. The Maison des Cultures du Monde in Paris, which had staged the original Mays and Burrus concert, presented Texas in Paris in December 2016.

Now Texas in Paris is coming home to Texas. That feels good to Govenar, a Boston native who came to Austin to earn his master's in folklore and anthropology from the University of Texas, then moved to Dallas in 1980 to finish his doctorate in arts and humanities at the University of Dallas. In Dallas, he met his wife, artist, author and philanthropist Kaleta Doolin, and decided to stay.

Govenar is in discussions about other productions of the show after the final performance Sunday at the Eisemann Center. He says he hopes the show will have a future, because he believes it starts a conversation.

"People come out of the show feeling better about race relations than they did going in. The world is a tough place, but theater expresses a deep truth and a deep message to never lose hope. I hope this will touch people and push people to try to be more sensitive and understanding."